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Maths: Understanding Data

In Maths we have been collecting data on Class 2’s favourite toys and showing our findings in bar charts. Some of the bar charts the children have created this week have been incredible. They can answer questions about a bar chart, too: What is the most popular toy? What are the two least popular toys? Also, they can draw a pictogram to show their findings. In one of our lessons, we wanted to find out Class 2’s favourite football team. Disappointingly, Manchester Utd was the most popular team so I took that out of our findings. Here, Cubes group represent our data in the form of a 3-D bar chart.

Literacy: Instructions

Follwing on from writing their own instructions, Class 2 have had the opportunity to make something. We decided to make some sandwiches so why not ask your child for your favourite one and they should be able to make it for you!  Here are some pictures of the fun learning:

To tie in with our topic this term, Toybox, the children this week will be learning how to make a paper aeroplane – so I apologise in advance if your home turns into a landing strip. At the end of this week, ask your child to instruct you to make a paper aeroplane and see if they can use:

• time connectives (then, after, first, finally etc)
• numbers for a list
• ‘bossy’ verbs (place, fold, put, bend, touch, go)

Are you a pushy parent?

A recent article published on the BBC website suggests being a pushy parent is not such a bad thing.

Recent research suggests that parents who push their children to work hard at school have a big impact on their child’s academic success.  The effort a parent puts into ensuring their child buckles down to schoolwork has a greater impact than that put in by the child or the school, according to researchers at Leicester and Leeds universities.  Amongst the aspects the researchers considered were how much time parents read to a child and how often they attended school meetings.

Most parents / carers tell me they’d like to support their child more, but don’t know where to start.

Well, a good starting point is our own website  – go to the blue section (‘Learn More’) and look at the National Expectations section which outlines standards and in bold, there are practical ideas.

You can also use the BBC website – it has some great activities and advice to support you and your child to learn more.  (I like Digger and the Gang to support maths – Nash, Flick and Sprat will help your child get their numerical skills on track!)

And most importantly, get involved in hearing your child read (ideally on a daily basis, even if just for five minutes), and help them to learn their times tables and spellings – check out our homework information including the Parents and Carers Guide which you can download.

Practical Maths

One of our Year 1 pupils estimated that there were 30 Smarties in his box. He then counted them and wasn’t far off. There were 27!

Next, he sorted them into colours and wrote down the correlating number and number name.

The whole class enjoyed learning how to estimate and write number names.

1 November 2010

The learning objective for this list is to spell words with the ’th’ sound.

These will be tested on Friday 5 November.

Enjoying Golden Time

Class Assembly

Well done to the whole class for an excellent effort with their class assembly!

Don’t forget ‘Relax and Read’ every Wednesday!

SEAL statement 1 November

This half term our SEAL theme is all about Getting On and our first statement is ‘I can work co-operatively to help a group.’ 

The SEAL theme Getting On focusses on four main aspects:

• developing the social skills of friendship
• working well together in a group
• managing anger
• resolving conflict

Group work takes place across all lessons and even at lunchtime and playtimes.  Some questions for children to consider are:

• Did everyone take turns?
• Did everyone listen to what other people thought?
• Did each person have chance to tell the group what they thought?
• If people had different ideas could the group reach a compromise?

Half-term holiday

Our policy is not to give homework in the holidays.  However, if you’d like to support your child’s learning at home, have a look at the Homework Tips for Parents (which has ideas for extra practice) and the National Expectations section (which should give you some ideas about what to learn more about).

Don’t forget: all children should be reading on a daily basis: comics, books, websites.  Why not make a trip to the library this holiday?

Older children should also practise times tables (why not re-cap all the tables you’ve practised so far this year?).